From a 17th-Century House and Gardens to a Historic Market Town
Blickling Hall is a major National Trust property in fine countryside near Aylsham. This route explores the house and village of Blickling, taking in some fine parkland walking. The National Trust inherited Blickling Hall, together with its farms, cottages, and 4,500 acres of land, on the death of the 11th Marquess of Lothian in 1940.
In the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir Henry Hobart bought a moated manor here and proceeded to replace it with the current house, which was largely completed before his death in 1625. The architect was Robert Lyminge, who a few years earlier designed Hatfield House (the two houses have many features in common, including the corner cupolas and central clock tower).
As you begin the walk, you get a good view between massive yew hedges of the south elevation flanked by its impressive Dutch-gabled service wings.
The gardens are as fine as the house, substantially redesigned between the wars by Nora Lindsay. On the west side of the hall, in the former orchard, is a large garden centre where you can buy plants raised here (often open when the hall and gardens are closed).
The route leaves the grounds and passes a fine barn behind the Buckinghamshaw Arms before entering Blickling Park. The park was ploughed up in World War II to grow food, but it is now fully restored.
There are several public paths crossing the park, and the walk follows the most important one: the Weavers' Way. This is a 56-mile (90-kilometre) route joining Cromer on the north Norfolk coast with Great Yarmouth on the east coast, with long sections following the course of the former King's Lynn to Great Yarmouth line of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway.
Blickling HallBlickling Mill
Blickling Tower is visible away in the southwest corner of the park. A square brick construction with a cylindrical tower and crenellations, it was built around 1770 to give a grandstand view of a racecourse that has since vanished (converted to a house around 1860).
Between widely spaced yew hedges on the near edge of some woods, you can see the dark grey bulk of a stone pyramid — 35 feet (10.5 metres) square and about the same height — where John Hobart (Earl of Buckinghamshire) and his two wives are interred in a mausoleum consecrated in 1797.
Beyond the trees, the walk leaves the park to visit disused Blickling Mill, sited on the River Bure (which rises on the Cromer-Holt Ridge and meanders westwards to Great Yarmouth).
You take another route back through the park and beyond the hall to St Andrew's Church, which contains many memorials to people who have lived at the hall (including brasses dedicated to members of the Boleyn family, whose grandfather once owned the estate, and a fine effigy of the 8th Marquess of Lothian carved in 1878).
Across from the church is an ice house — a domed brick structure with steps down to an underground cavern where winter ice from nearby ponds was stored, insulated by layers of straw to keep perishable goods fresh in warmer months.
Blickling TowerBlickling Mausoleum
A slight detour on the way into Aylsham takes you to a bridge over the River Bure with a view of magnificent Aylsham Mill (seen at closer quarters at the end of Mill Row). Recorded in the Domesday Book, the present 13-bay building was constructed in 1798, beneath whose pantilled roof are two white-painted lucams (overhanging structures housing lifting gear).
Aylsham is a small market town of Saxon origin. In the 14th century, the king gave the manor to John of Gaunt, who made it the administrative centre for Norfolk. Prospering from the wool trade in the 16th century, Flemish weavers who settled here taught their skills to locals, and the town produced its own type of cloth.
Notable sights in the town square include the Town Hall and the Black Boy (an old coaching inn with a black-and-white frieze under the roofline), while on the corner of Barclays Bank is a plaque to Christopher Layer, who died for the Jacobite cause.
The John Soame Memorial Pump stands on an island site at Carrs Corner in Penfold Street, erected in 1913 to commemorate an Aylsham worthy (it was not until 1938 that Aylsham had a piped public water supply, and the memorial had an endowment to pay for regular re-thatching with Norfolk reed).
Just north of Market Place is the parish church of St Michael's (dating mainly from the 14th and 15th centuries with good brasses). In the churchyard near the east end is the grave of landscape architect Humphry Repton, who is believed to have helped lay out the park at Blickling (he wrote his own epitaph on his grave).
The return to Blickling is along roads and field paths, ending with a bridleway running alongside the road back to the hall.
Aylsham MillA corner off Aylsham town centre
Acknowledgment: Text derived from the Out and Out Series; Discovering the Countryside on Foot. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.
